Chloe Shorten on life, love and family with federal Opposition Leader Bill Shorten
SHE may one day be Australia’s first lady, but she’s not often in the spotlight - and that’s the way she likes it. Chloe Shorten opens up on life with Bill, shopping nightmares and raising a family in the digital world.
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CHLOE Shorten comes to the interview armed with two coffees and a fruit salad.
She looks stunning, in simple black pants and top, and wears the apprehensive look of one approaching the dentist’s chair.
“This is kind of like a therapy session isn’t it?’’ she laughs, as she sits down for her first formal interview as the wife of federal Opposition Leader Bill Shorten.
She is charming, and smart and smiling, and faintly uncomfortable with the spotlight.
Which is fascinating, given she is a former newspaper and magazine journalist, and grew up in the public eye as one of five children of Dame Quentin Bryce, a pioneering feminist and educator, who became Australia’s first female governor-general.
Mrs Shorten, 43, met Mr Shorten in 2007, when she was working in corporate relations in the resource industry and he was the Parliamentary Secretary for Disabilities and Children’s Services in the Rudd Government.
She moved to Melbourne when she married Mr Shorten in 2009 and their little girl, Clementine, was born. Now, Clemmie is five, and they live in Moonee Ponds with Mrs Shorten’s children from her previous marriage, Rupert, 13, and Georgette, 12, and their two British bulldogs.
Despite six years of immersion in political life, Mrs Shorten has mostly kept herself and her children out of the political spotlight, trying to hang on to a modicum of privacy in a digital world that sees them filmed on smart phones just about every time they step outside the door.
“We talk quietly about the groceries in the grocery aisle,’’ she says, with humour.
So a routine debate about how much chocolate is too much chocolate to put into the trolley could become public?
“We’re very careful about being heard,’’ she says.
The Shortens are the first of the major party leaders to raise very young children in a fully digital world, and Mrs Shorten says she is conscious of protecting their privacy now, and into the future, when their images will live on forever in cyberspace.
But she accepts public interest in her and her children will build as Australia heads towards a federal election campaign.
“We’ve had a few experiences. People want to come up and take selfies with Bill, so the selfies have been an adjustment because you never know when (someone) is going to want a selfie.
“We try to make sure our hair is brushed and I try to avoid wearing my Ugg boots as much as possible outside!’’
Mrs Shorten says the intense nature of Mr Shorten’s job means the family needs to grab time together when they can.
Sometimes, that means attending a community festival or event, or even an occasional speech, with the kids in tow.
“They quite like doing that and sometimes I get bumped by one of them to go, which is lovely because it’s a great way for them to see some of the amazing things that Bill’s job can teach them,’’ she says.
“They’ve met wonderful people and they’ve learnt great things. They get into it because they’re with him so we try and keep it as family-orientated as possible without making them feel uncomfortable sometimes if there are media or cameras.’’
Little Clementine has grown up around the media, and is sometimes seen at the back of press conferences, unfazed by the cameras.
“We obviously need to be very careful of her future privacy ... but she’s a force of nature,’’ Mrs Shorten says of her forthright five-year-old.
“She’s absolutely her dad, she’s a mini him.’’
Chloe Bryce was born in Brisbane in 1971, the fourth of five children, to Quentin and Michael Bryce.
She remembers an idyllic childhood in suburban Brisbane, attending the local primary school and running around with other neighbourhood kids in the university suburb of St Lucia.
The Bryce kids spent hours in a neighbour’s pool playing Marco Polo, and roaming the campus of the University of Queensland where her mother was a law lecturer. They explored the river banks, swung from the trees and walked to school with about 30 other kids. Chloe joined the Brownies, and played flute and piano and sang in the local choir.
After high school, she joined the Sunday Mail in Brisbane as a copygirl, and started studying journalism remotely through Deakin University in Victoria, where she went on to get her degree in communications.
Editor Bob Gordon gave her the start she needed in journalism, then she went to live with family friends in Port Moresby, where she volunteered and continued her university studies.
“Papua New Guinea in the late ’80s!’’ she recalls.
“Port Moresby was a pretty amazing place, great families I visited and I learnt a lot about the place in a voluntary capacity.’’
It was here she gained an interest in medical and health research, which continues today and which sees her volunteer her time with the Burnet Institute, which works to improve health outcomes through research and policy.
“I stumbled across Burnet, they do a really good program in PNG which I love called Healthy Mothers Healthy Babies and it’s an intervention and education program to try to prevent the terrible rates of infant mortality on our doorstep.’’
Returning to Australia, she worked for Australian Consolidated Press, writing for magazines including Cleo, then made the leap into marketing and communications, working mainly over the years with technology and resources companies.
She met and married architect Roger Parkin in Brisbane and their children were born in 2001 and 2002.
Mrs Shorten says she never expected her life to be this way — that she would meet Mr Shorten, have another child, move to Melbourne and find herself married to the alternative prime minister.
“Ah no, but I’m not sure it does for anybody, does it?’’ she says of life’s sudden twists and turns.
The move to Melbourne took a little adjustment time — Mr Shorten became a father and stepfather, suddenly, to three children, and Mrs Shorten was starting anew in a city in which she’d worked but never lived.
“I moved to a place called Moonee Ponds and I’m thinking, ‘Is there really a place called Moonee Ponds? Is this a joke?’, just because I knew about Dame Edna and those kinds of things.’’
Moonee Ponds appealed to her immediately, its village feel and welcoming community.
“It’s just the most gorgeous place and again there’s that diversity, the different ethnicities and the grannies and various crowds hanging around.’’
She describes her arrival in our great city as like a “migrant woman with two children, pregnant, coming to the shores of Melbourne’’.
“I have this beautiful neighbour who shares my birthday who’s exactly 30 years older. The first time I met her she came up to me with something she (baked) and I was very pregnant and I was moving a chair. And she said to me, ‘You’re a bit like me’, in her thick Italian accent, and told me how she came here when she was pregnant herself, 30 or so years earlier. We sort of bonded over that.’’
So is that how she feels? Like a stranger in a strange land?
“Oh yeah, it’s when you do it with little kids it’s a completely different experience, because you’re not just putting roots down for yourself, you’re putting down roots for a whole community for your kids as well.’’
There’s no doubt an intelligent, articulate, attractive spouse can be a significant political asset, so it’s a little surprising Mrs Shorten hasn’t been seen much in Mr Shorten’s public life.
She’s far from a political animal, not involved in the running of Mr Shorten’s office, and besides raising three children, is working four days a week in corporate affairs with engineering firm Calibre.
And she quite simply isn’t chasing the limelight.
“I’m a little shyer than people might think,’’ she says.
“Sometimes it’s a bit surreal when there are a lot of (cameras). When I’m with Bill I just smile and have a bit of a laugh. The photographers and camera people are usually funny and really nice and I take every situation as it comes.’’
She says the experiences growing up with her mother in the public spotlight were different, because her mother was not seeking public office, and the media and public attention was a byproduct of her campaigning and advocacy work.
“She became an advocate and she was always the same, but watching how she would handle things, she was always a very family-orientated, fun, smiley country girl.
“So just watching her I suppose, I’m sure some of those things rub off on you without realising, how to conduct herself, she’s always shown a lot of grace under pressure.
“I think it’s always about the courage of your convictions and that sort of strips away any of the real self-consciousness I suppose.’’
Mrs Shorten herself showed that same grace under pressure when Mr Shorten was accused last year of raping a 16-year-old girl at a Labor function in the 1980s.
He vehemently denied the allegations. Victoria Police investigated but decided not to lay charges on the basis there was no reasonable prospect of conviction.
The inquiry sparked an online whispering campaign against Mr Shorten, who decided to out himself publicly and address the claims after the inquiry was completed.
That decision also came after one of Mrs Shorten’s children stumbled across some of the more vicious comments about the inquiry online.
The experience has clearly hurt Mrs Shorten deeply — she becomes visibly distressed and digs about in her fruit salad seeking solace in a slice of apple for a few moments while considering how to answer questions about the inquiry, and her decision to publicly face the media with Mr Shorten to show her support for him.
“It was very difficult,’’ she says. “But we supported each other and I think he did the right thing, talking about it in public.
“It was a really difficult time for all of us. The children weren’t aware of it until something on social media came to their attention.’’
She described the experience as something she had never expected, and one of the downsides of public life.
“No one could predict something like that, some people say, ‘Oh you know what you’re getting in for’, but no one can predict something like that happening,’’ she says.
She said she was “absolutely comfortable” with the way Mr Shorten handled the inquiry and its aftermath.
“It was the right thing to do and why he did what he did and totally in sync with him,” she sums up.
If that experience last August was a low point in the Shortens’ public life, Mrs Shorten is clear on what the high points are.
“The good things are watching him put a voice to things he feels really deeply about that I share,’’ she says.
“Most issues that he feels really strongly about I’m the same. Over the journey of us creating a great connection was the work he did in disability.
“My entire childhood was peppered with activity (in disability advocacy). My grandmother taught children with disabilities. We grew up with an ordinary integrated community with kids who had disabilities. We were familiar with the challenges that that brings for a family and my parents were very passionate about getting involved in that.’’
Her mother campaigned for people with disabilities, and her father had been designing housing and furniture for people with disabilities since the ’70s.
“So when Bill took up the cudgels of reform, my dad I think was the chairman of the Year of the Disabled and my grandma had worked in that field and I was on one of the largest disability boards in Australia called Endeavour. It had 3000 clients, 2000 staff, lots of people with intellectual disabilities and the issues about their worlds were familiar to me.
“So when he started working in that area and really started to shine a light on some of those things I was so proud of him, equally outraged by the lack of support and the voicelessness of some of these things, what Bill calls midnight anxieties, of families.’’
There is no hesitation when Mrs Shorten is asked to identify the things that attracted her to Mr Shorten.
“He is an awesome stepfather,’’ she says. “It’s not really a well-known part of his life but he’s this full-time stepdad.
“We’re a blended family and part of the blending is that force of nature Clementine.
“She’s just absolutely adored by her brother and sister, who are just gorgeous to her.
“(Bill) has such a great wit. He’s a very funny man and he’s a very positive, optimistic, generous person.
“I love his integrity, I love the fact that he has the courage of his convictions, he’s very brave. It takes some bravery to have three children in one fell swoop, and to do that with such commitment and such passion where he bends over backwards.
“His diary very much revolves around the important and not-so-important things the kids are doing so that’s one of the things I really cherish about him because these days there are more and more families like ours, step-families, blended families and different types that aren’t the traditional units we grew up with.
“That side of him is not necessarily something we show or talk about, because of wanting to protect the privacy of the kids.
“It’s a fine balance these days with social media and public life.
“Public life in a sense is different to what I anticipated. I think people sometimes say, ‘You grew up, you were in a public life so you must have a sense of what it might be like’, but there’s a distinction.”
She says she would never seek elected office for herself.
“Nooooooo. No way,’’ she laughs.
If the pair grew up in different states and with different upbringings — Mr Shorten was deeply immersed in Labor politics from a young age — they shared something in common.
Both had progressive, trailblazing, academic mothers. (Mr Shorten’s mother Anne passed away last year.)
“I think that’s what’s very common about our childhoods. We both had law-lecturing mothers who started kindies at their universities.’’
Their relationship was controversial at the time when Labor’s leadership was unstable, and Dame Quentin, as Governor-General, had the ability to dismiss Mr Shorten in extreme circumstances.
Mrs Shorten jokes that her husband had to behave better at the family Christmas lunch than the other sons-in-law, but says her main relief when her mother retired as Governor-General was that it allowed her to spend more time with her grandchildren.
An average week in the Shorten house, if such a thing exists, will see Mrs Shorten trying to spend one night in Canberra each sitting fortnight, while juggling her job, school duties, sport, ballet lessons for the girls, and learning more about her adopted city.
She says the household is a “midnight zoo arrangement” of kids and dogs and activities.
And she’s so far resisted adopting an AFL team, defying expectations she’ll join her husband in backing Collingwood and taking delight in occasionally donning a Western Bulldogs or Essendon scarf, just to stir up the household.
She continues to express surprise that the media is interested in her appearance, saying she’s no fashionista like her mother, who is famous for her elegant sense of style.
“I do not think I’m very fashionable,” she says. “I like being well groomed and ironed. I think my wonderful grandmother and aunt, who is in Adelaide and they were all beautifully groomed, those country girls.
“I just like to be presentable I suppose. I did grow up playing in my mother’s cupboard.”
Agreeing her mother’s dress-up box would have been a marvellous treasure trove, she laments that most of those beautiful tailored outfits went to charity.
“My mother’s dress-up box has largely been given to various charitable organisations. While I love those organisations have benefited from that, I would have really loved to keep a beautiful grey soft dress that I remember from my childhood so if anybody’s got it, can I have it back?” she jokes.
“I’ve always been in a corporate environment so I’ve always been in suits but I notice in Melbourne we don’t do yellow suits here.”
She describes her mother as “very elegant” and says being well presented is a way of showing respect to your hosts.
“I always say to my kids it’s always nice to dress up for your hosts, it’s a compliment,” she says.
“My dad is also a very snappy dresser and always taught us to polish our shoes, the boys were always ironing their shirts.
“My three brothers knew how to iron their shirt before they were 12 and I think it might have been his air force background too.’’
Originally published as Chloe Shorten on life, love and family with federal Opposition Leader Bill Shorten
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